Aleksei was, perhaps, a typical Khrushchev-era college student. He went to class, stayed active in the Komsomol, and felt proud of the Soviet system he was helping to build. In 1957 he became head of the ideological section of the Komsomol's Council of Young Scientists. He recalled in a 2006 interview, "Sometimes I get terribly hurt that those who were once close to me are now rabid haters of communist ideas, of the Party. I could almost lose my temper. In principle a lot was allowed. For example, we opened the first youth cafe here in Irkutsk...We opened two." Aleksei also played in Irkutsk's first KVN season, in 1966, as a student at the medical institute. He only competed for a year, though, before becoming a long-time jury member. He judged KVN competitions until 1982. "It was required to have a representative from the regional Komsomol on the panel," he said (Aleksei, interview with Bella Ostromooukhova, May 2006).

KVN and televised KVN arrived at the same time in Irkutsk, perhaps reflecting the influence of what was, at the time, the most popular TV program in the USSR. Competitions from Moscow got broadcast throughout the country. Irkutsk was unique in that it produced and broadcast its own local KVN shows, as well. One of the young competitors Aleksei judged was the captain of the Energy Systems Institute KVN team (Institut Sistem Energetiki, or SEI), Aleksandr Koshelev (Aleksei, interview with Bella Ostromooukhova, May 2006). He is pictured below wearing a cap and medal in Irkutsk's first KVN competition, held on February 19, 1966. In his memoirs Koshelev described KVN this way, "As in a dance, you need a partner. As in a debate, you need an opponent. As in sports, you can't do without fans. As in a competition—you can't run away from your rival. And you also have to be cheerful, inventive, and very clever, all very quickly. The enemy is always alert" (Koshelev n.d., 1). 

In KVN, Koshelev favored both the cheerful and the satirical. Three days after the first Irkutsk competition, he, a teammate, and the Energy Systems Institute's Komsomol secretary wrote to the director of Irkutsk's television studio, T.A. Sheshukova, to complain. The organizers, they said, had fallen down on their duties. First, the emcees did not properly introduce the teams. "Before the competition," they wrote, "the hosts should briefly describe the competing teams, present the teams to each other, introduce the captains, etc." Television viewers also did not have equal views of both teams on the stage, the scoring system was "unsuccessful," two numbers got cut from the program (the day-of), and jury members delivered their scoring evaluations incorrectly. "The jury should have given their decisions on individual competitions within the game and explained their reasoning, as it's done in Moscow." Koshelev and his friends also objected to the comportment of one of their competitors, who said looked like he would have "punched someone in the face." One of the judges, moreover, had reportedly told Koshelev's team, "Why did you play so badly today, showing us what look like rehearsals! I built the whole show around what your competitors did." The disappointed, wounded, insulted members of SEI concluded their nine-page letter to Irkutsk's television director with three requests for future programs:

(1) The event must be decidedly friendly
(2) The program must get a public response; that is, satire is absolutely required
(3) Judging should be qualified and objective

Without high standards, Koshelev and his friends argued, "a good thing might stall or degenerate into empty banter." Satire would preserve the game as one of intellectual rigor. He framed the need for biting comedy, thus, in the ideological language of kulturnost—a value few could argue with.

Koshelev also claimed that KVN had concrete social, interpersonal benefits for young people. In one of the first in a string of articles for Irkutsk newspapers spanning twenty years, Koshelev outlined KVN's social value in concrete terms. "So what does competing in KVN give to the collective?" he asked. "Of course, in the case of victory, we get great joy and moral satisfaction." That, though, came second to the opportunities KVN offered to connect with others. He continued, "The most important thing [KVN offers], in my opinion, is the healing (or prevention) of people shutting themselves off in the shells of their specializations, or their companies. It is a shake-up, it adds zing to cultural work; it is the identification of talent, team-building—a complex of KVN-o-therapy" (Koshelev 1967).

Even today, discourses about KVN stress its social import. Yuli Gusman, a successful 1960s competitor and long-time judge, said after the 2013 Top League finals round, "Our game has been going on since 1961. Since 1961...and if the television audience, people taken [with KVN], cry, suffer, make merry, become joyful, laugh out loud, and become friends—it's a wonderful thing, and we call it KVN" (KVN 2013). KVN furthered core socialist values, which included, according to Alexei Yurchak, "community, selflessness, altrusim, selflessness, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future" (Yurchak 2006, 8). KVN may have received state support because it furthered these values. But participants also benefitted from an environment that prized community, friendship, education, and creativity. Many thousands still do.

Even though KVN, STEM, and agitbrigade skits all built their performances around kapustniki, KVN became far more popular. KVN drew in crowds partly because it was a game; competition adds dramatic interest for an audience. In another departure from standard amateur theater groups, KVN incorporated improvisational elements. KVN's signature event, razmynki ("exercises") required competitors to respond in a humorous way to questions from judges or their competitors. Another standard event, the Captain's Contest, saw team captains trade quips on a given theme. Sometimes competitors floundered, failing to come up with a funny answer. But audiences delighted when one hit the mark. 

As a mishmash of theater, comedy, improv, and variety show, KVN was to student theater what pickleball is to tennis. Albert Aksel'rod, one of KVN's creators, listed the elements of KVN as the following:

1. estrada
2. student amateur activity
3. sport
4. a contest of scholars
5. a tournament of wits
6. tomfoolery
7. theater
8. criticism of shortcomings
9. a game
10. an evening of recreation   (Aksel'rod 1974, 21)  

Teams opened with a pre-prepared introduction (privetstvie), a short number that often included singing. An improvisational segment then followed, either a game (like untangling audiotape) or giving witty responses to questions in razminka. In the opening game of the 1964 season, competitors quizzed each other during razminka with questions that all began with the word "why." If the questioning team stumped the other before five questions had been asked, they would get two points. The team from the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers asked those from the Moscow Aviation Institute, "Why do we use the real number system?" The young men from the Aviation Institute answered, "We use real numbers because people began counting to ten using their fingers." The exchange continued:

Transport: And why did people begin counting to ten on their fingers, in particular?
Aviation: Because they are easily available for a person.
Transport: And why are they the most easily available?
Aviation: Because counting on your toes is harder than counting on your fingers.
Transport: And why is it harder to count on your feet than your hands?
Aviation: Just try it! You would have to take your boots off.    (KVN 1964)

The exchange is not riotously funny, especially in translation. The crowd enjoyed it because teams responded on the spot, on live TV. Improvisational performances up the level of potential surprise in a punchline. As Albert Akselrod argued in a book called Course in the Cheerful Sciences, "the comic = the recognizable + the unexpected" (1974, 86). People must share background information in order to understand a joke (recognition), but the best punchlines catch the audience off guard. "What does cat plus mouse equal?" Aksel'rod asked, by way of example. Answer: "Cat." He continued, "What is 'water and stone?' Mineral water." In early KVN people most loved watching off-the-cuff wit. Masliakov wrote, "We considered KVN to be improvisation plus rhythm" (Masliakov 1996, 19). One literary event, popular in the 1960s but gone by the 1980s, combined prepared skits and improvisation. BRIZ (Biuro po ratsionalizatsii i izobretenie), or the Bureau of Rationalization and Invention, required competitors to write a kapustnik on a given theme, but teams got a limited amount of time to prepare. Unlike skits in the "introduction" or "homework" sections of the show, which teams scripted in collaboration with writers from their home regions, organizers announced the theme for BRIZ only after teams arrived in Moscow. They got a few days to brainstorm, then performed what they came up with for the show's producers before airtime (Janco 2004, 22). Most likely, editors wanted to vet content for ideological appropriateness rather than punchline quality. Commenting on her time managing Soviet television programs, KVN editor Elena Gal'perina noted, "The ideal show is one where there is no text at all" (Gal'perina 1983, 9). Without words, chances for political missteps were circumscribed. It's difficult to get too cheeky with an audiotape race. 

Gal'perina had cause for concern. Until 1968 all KVN shows were live. And funny, intelligent youth tend not to abide by rules. KVN only had four: don't joke about the Central Committee; don't joke about the Politburo; don't joke about countries that had strained relations with the USSR; and, finally, don't joke about the KGB (Janco 2004, 38). I imagine all of these were broken, by some team, somewhere in the Soviet Union. But a group of Ukrainian students transgressed the final one spectacularly during the 1966 finals round.

In 1966 the team Chimney Sweeps (Trubochisty) from Odessa satirized the KGB. The theme of that year's competition was "Telepathy Surrounds Us." Odessa sang a song whose lyrics spoke of telepaths working "some with telephones, some with automatics" acting as operators on a global communications network: "They connect our friendly signals." Telepath, though, also meant KGB agent. The word "automatic" (avtomat) could mean any machine, but calls to mind, as in English, automatic weapons. Read this way, their song depicted not benevolent telepathic operators but KGB agents alternatively listening in on phone calls and gunning people down (Janco 2013, 132-133). Of course, the second meaning is deniable, which is why the satellite feed was not cut (this had been done for bawdy jokes in the past). Historian Andrew Janco maintains, however, that even those people who had not caught the second meaning of the joke during the show would have heard about it as people inevitably discussed KVN the next day, amplifying the effect of the pun beyond the broadcast moment. During the same show the Chimney Sweeps even mocked KGB disapproval for illicit humor. They said, "Laughter is a personal matter (lichnoe delo) for everyone. Let's make everyone a 'personal matter' and laugh." Lichnoe delo translates both as personal matter and personal file. The second sentence, about making someone a "personal matter/file" reveals that "file" was an intended meaning. In this context, then, the personal file is a KGB file: "Let's make everyone a KGB file and keep laughing." Strong stuff. There is no indication, though, that the Chimney Sweeps faced reprobation for their skit. It is, after all, hard to prove the meaning of a pun, especially since performances were not recorded. We have one of the Chimney Sweeps themselves, Simon Livshin, to thank for this story; he related it to Andrew Janco in 2003 (Janco 2004, 37-38).

Koshelev recalled a few scandals in Irkutsk KVN in the 1960s, as well. In one improvisational game, contestants were shown a photograph of a poster that promoted educational progress and asked to explain its significance. The poster stood in front of the Church of the Holy Cross, which gave KVNshiki room to juxtapose church and state. The winning answer was the "philosophical law of unity and battle of opposites"—but the church stood above the Party poster, indicating that it had won. This was not the approved position of the atheist state. "They almost put us all in prison for this," Koshelev said. "They took the editor to the mat immediately," he continued. "These are the kinds of things that happened [back then]. Of course, no one spoke against the Party or government, and no one laughed at the leaders as is done today. Then everything was clear, strict" (interview with Bella Ostromooukhova, May 2006, Irkutsk).

Another member of the Odessa Chimney Sweeps, Valentin Krapiva, spoke about a less controversial incident from the 1966 Moscow broadcast. As representatives of Odessa the team thought they should reference works by native author Isaac Babel. Since some of his most famous personae were bandits, the Chimney Sweeps decided to kick off their skit with this kind of character. Krapiva walked onto the stage, approached the microphone, and said, "Look to the right!" A thousand people in the audience turned their heads to the right. And, Krapiva realized, viewers at home might be doing the same thing. "Once and for all," he wrote, "I understood that television is not a toy. And KVN—KVN is a great, magical power" (Krapiva n.d., 7). He was right. KVN's satire had the power to create change. Or, as in the case of the telepaths number, to acknowledge the darker corners of everyday Soviet life. The ability to broadcast ideas instantly, to millions of viewers, presented stunning possibilities. Television's drama, danger, and novelty launched KVN not only onto TV screens across the USSR, but into schools, universities, houses of culture, and factories. From Belgorod to Bishkek, grade school and university students alike played KVN. It was here, at the end of the 1960s, that KVN as a television program and KVN as an oral tradition began to diverge. Sergei Lapin, who became chairman of the State Committee on Television and Radio in 1970 "did not like the game, hated it," and, according to Yuli Gusman, schemed for two years to get the program cancelled (Janco 2004, 54; Shedrinskii 1996, 20). He won. The television show went off the air from 1972 to 1986. KVN as a community activity, however, continued—a story I detail in the next few sections.